Nowadays, businesses need to make paradigm shifts in their delivery process to ensure high-quality applications are rolled out faster and efficiently. An important shift is application modernization — overhauling legacy or outdated systems by leveraging modern technologies. This is where a critical aspect of this digital transformation comes into picture called Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, which aims to reorganize and pace-up the development, testing, and deployment of applications.
With this blog, let’s try to focus on CI/CD pipeline, and why is it essential for modernization of legacy apps.
Maximizing Modernization: Continuous Delivery in Action
Modernized applications thrive on agility and scalability, and CD pipelines deliver precisely that. Here’s how:
1. Quicker Go-To-Market
CI/CD pipelines helps in automation of repetitive tasks while reducing manual work allowing enterprises to release new features and updates faster. This in-turn accelerates the overall development lifecycle. Recent research suggests that businesses using CI/CD pipelines have seen a decrease of 33% in time-to-market when compared to traditional practices. Another study shows 40% reduction of deployment time after implementation of CI/CD pipelines in many cases.
2. Improved Quality & Reduced Failure Rates
With rigorous automated testing at every stage, the chances of configuration drift and deployment-related issues decrease significantly, ensuring reliable application performance. A recent report saw a 40% reduction in post-release defects in organizations implementing CD pipelines. And what’s more, according to a Google study, high-performing DevOps organizations deploying multiple times per day with robust CI/CD pipelines have a 7.5% change failure rate compared to 23% for low performers. Similarly, another study found that organizations implementing CI/CD practices saw a 50% reduction in change failure rate.
3. Enhanced Collaboration
CD pipelines foster a DevOps culture by bridging the gap between development and operations teams, ensuring seamless communication and workflow integration. Did you know that organizations with strong CI/CD practices reported 60% higher team efficiency than those functioning without?!
4. Scalability and Flexibility
With modern applications often running in cloud environments, CD pipelines make it easier to scale resources up or down, ensuring applications remain responsive under varying loads. Organizations implementing CI/CD practices experienced a 50% increase in the ability to experiment and innovate; skills that are absolutely essential for scalability.
5. Cost Efficiency
While streaming processes minuses resource wastage, faster bug detection, rapid issue resolution, and reduced downtime translate to significant cost savings as well. According to a Forester study, organizations leveraging CI/CD practices witnessed a 50% reduction in development and operations costs.
Future Trends in Continuous Delivery and Application Modernization
As technology evolves, so does the landscape of CD pipelines and app modernization. The global Continuous Delivery (CD) market valued at USD 3.67 billion in 2023 is evolving rapidly as app modernization drives demand for faster, more reliable software delivery.
Going forward, here are some top trends shaping the future:
1. AI-Enabled Automation
Today, AI is revolutionizing pipelines with advanced tech like predictive analytics, self-curative systems, and smart testing, decreasing human administration and boosting deployments with speed & reliability. Utilizing AI-based tools, teams can now forecast failures, optimize workflows, and implement self-adjusting systems which reduces human involvement and enhances scalability. This trend ensures that modern apps meet the dynamic demands of today’s digital landscape.
2. Shift-Left Testing
Testing is being integrated earlier in the development cycle, aligning with the “shift-left” philosophy, to catch issues at their inception. This proactive approach catches bugs sooner, reduces costly delays, and ensures higher-quality releases. Going forward, automated security checks, compliance scanning, and vulnerability detection are slated to become standard in modern CD pipelines.
3. Microservices and Containerization
Modernized applications increasingly rely on microservices and containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes), enabling modular, scalable, and isolated deployments through CD pipelines. To accommodate this, pipelines will evolve to better support microservices architecture. Segmenting apps into smaller, standalone services and leveraging containerization for portability, this enables teams to deploy updates faster and with more flexibility.
4. GitOps
GitOps is a primary model for software deployment and will continue to grow, notably in cloud-native environments. This approach utilizes Git repositories as the single source of truth to define and manage app infrastructure, boosting consistency and visibility. The approach also brings version control, automation, and collaboration to the forefront, enabling faster, more reliable updates. With GitOps, teams achieve greater consistency, enhanced scalability, and seamless app modernization.
5. Serverless Architectures
CD pipelines are rapidly adapting to deploy serverless applications as they eliminate infrastructure management and enable on-demand scalability. This trend allows teams to reduce costs and complexity and focus solely on code and rapid deployment. By leveraging serverless, CD pipelines become faster, more efficient, and perfectly suited for modern, dynamic applications.
6. Edge Computing
Edge computing is transforming CD pipelines by bringing application deployment and processing closer to users. This growing trend reduces latency, enhances performance, and ensures real-time responsiveness, allowing app modernization efforts to deliver faster, smarter, and more localized experiences for the modern digital era.
7. Low-Code Development
This approach encourages teams to develop and deploy applications quicker with minimum amount of coding. It provides a UI where users can drag & drop modules to build software applications resulting in accelerated innovation, reduced complexity, and reducing the gap between tech and non-tech stakeholders. With low code, app modernization becomes more agile, efficient, and accessible to all, freeing up specialized developers to work on more complex tasks.
8. Cloud Native Development
Cloud-native development is at the front of modernizing CI/CD pipelines, leveraging the power of cloud platforms to deliver at pace. Cloud-native pipelines streamline software deployment and enable faster iteration because they adopt containerization, microservices, and serverless computing. This not just increases speed of development cycles but also ensures applications are optimized for dynamic, distributed environments which boosts innovation soon in the future.
Conclusion
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines are the core of application modernization, empowering businesses to innovate faster, reduce risks, and satisfy evolving customer demands. Businesses achieve agility in the changing tech landscape by automating and streamlining the overall delivery process. For modernizing legacy systems and developing cloud-native apps, successful integration of robust CI/CD pipeline is critical to ensure success. To achieve this seamlessly, businesses need a strategic partner that understands the intricacies of transformation.
Stride Digital empowers organizations to redefine their software delivery processes by combining advanced technologies with tailored modernization strategies. Discover how our expertise transforms challenges into seamless solutions for your business.
Contact us – www.stridedigitalpartners.com
